After Effects Apprentice 03: Advanced Animation

Author

Updated

11/7/2016

Released

1/26/2011

In this course, Chris Meyer helps beginning After Effects artists take their animations to the next level. Chris shows how to refine animations to create elegant, coordinated movements with the minimum number of keyframes—as well as slam-downs, whip pans, and other attention-getters. Additional movies show how to reverse-engineer existing animations, create variations on a theme, and master other parts of the program. Even though this course is designed for beginners, even veterans should learn tricks that many experienced users are unaware of. Chris' friendly running commentary lets you in on his mental process as he works on an animation. Exercise files for After Effects CS4 through CC are included with the course.

After Effects Apprentice is created by Trish and Chris Meyer and designed to be used on their own and as a companion to their book After Effects Apprentice.

Topics include:

Understanding how keyframes work under the hood

Controlling the anchor point to create more predictable animations

Mastering the Graph Editor for the ultimate control over keyframes

Animating parameters including motion paths

Hand-drawing motion paths to simplify complex movements

Applying and tweaking Motion Blur

Using hold keyframes

Skill Level Beginner

3h 1m

Duration

362,600

Views

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- Hi, I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Designand welcome to After Effects Apprentice: Advanced Animation.In this lesson, I want to share with youa number of tip and tricks you can useto help craft and refine your animationsinside After Effects.A lot of the lesson is going to be spenton the After Effects Graph Editor.That's the most powerful tool at your disposalto help refine your movements and your speed changesand coordinate movements acrossmultiple layers and multiple parameters.But there's a lot of other cool tricksinside After Effects, as well.For example, there's the often overlooked Anchor Point.

It's the center of all your transformationsin After Effects, but also it's a great thingto animate if you're trying tocreate a Ken Burns-style movement across still images.There's Motion Sketch, where you get tohand draw your own animation path.There's Smoother, where you get to smooth outkinks in that motion path.There's Auto Orient, where you can have layersautomatically rotate to follow your motion path.And then, there's also really nice thingslike Roving Keyframes, a little-known featureto control the speed across a complex motion pathwith just the start and end keyframes.There's other nice things in After Effects,like Motion Blur, the ability toautomatically blur objects depending on their movement.

There's Hold Keyframes, the ability to createstop-motion and slam-down animations.And there's also a few other tricks tocreate a really nice, smooth, elegant movementsin After Effects, as well.But, first, we're going to start with the fundamentals.How do you navigate between keyframesand what information exists in keyframesunderneath the hood that you can manipulateto help smooth out your animations?So, let's get started and let's have some fun.